I have seen loved ones get critically sick, and others die, as a result of a religious belief that says, using another person’s blood can impart their spirit on them. Some people justify this belief using Leviticus 17:11 which says that “the life of the flesh is in the blood.” Others stretch this idea further by demonising the use of kidney (or other body organ) transplants.

I remember an incident of a Jehovah’s Witness patient who was critically ill and urgently required blood transfusion but the family and the patient opposed the idea, much to the frustration of doctors. When his condition deteriorated further he consented but it was too late. He died. That’s just how dangerous and detrimental a wrong belief can be.

Here it is: Life being in the blood doesn’t mean that the blood itself is life. Life is not in the realm of physical matter which can be touched, weighed, carried or conserved from one place to another. Blood is only a medium through which life ‘flows’, similar to how a copper wire can transmit electricity but yet is itself not electricity! A portion of that copper wire can be cut and then replaced by another piece of copper wire, but that, granted that the replaced piece has similar properties to the previous one, won’t amount to a ‘different kind’ of electricity flowing through it. It will be the same electricity but flowing through a different medium.

Blood is a material thing which is reducible to physical particles. Life is not so. To this day Science can’t comprehend this mysterious power called life. Scientists have been able to analyse various media through which blood flows (i.e. veins, arteries, body organs, etc) but yet have never been able to see, confine, and define life itself! The one thing they know is that when life stops flowing through a person, everything stops to work. The system shuts down.

There is no equation that has been fathomed to express life in terms of elements, chemicals, or mathematical equations. If life was the very blood that is in our bodies, when a person dies, all we would need to do is to transfuse life (blood) into him and that would bring them back to life! Ofcourse we still have adventurous people who believe Science can provide a naturalistic answer to any phenomenon and they endeavour to one day settle down the Life-Question. I can only wish them all the best on their expedition. But here is what the Lord Jesus said: “It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life” (Joh.6:63). And John, a man who was able to perceive that this Universe had a beginning, way before modern Science could use Hubble’s evidence of an expanding universe, the Microwave Background Radiation, or the BGV theorem, wrote : “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… In him was life” (John 1:1,4).